Most Evangelicals have the church to thank for the Sunday-school classes that taught us what the Bible says and paved the way for our eventual decisions to commit our lives to Christ.
Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.
I feel in me the vocation of the Priest. I have the vocation of the Apostle. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth, and this dream has grown with me. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I desired to see myself in them all.
May our eyes focus rightly on Christ ... before the need to please others, before church, and before the busyness of Christian life. Those things will surely have their place, but they will be most valuable if put in their proper position.
If you had told me 28 years ago that the largest organization in the world touching the lives of gays and lesbians would be a church, I would not have believed you.
I loved my mission in Switzerland and Germany. As I left on the train from Basel, Switzerland, tears flowed down my cheeks because I knew then that my full-time service in the Church had ended.
I was raised in Austin, Texas, around trial lawyers. My friend and I - we were 14 - would go and watch her father try cases. I also heard of lot of Baptist preachers in little churches saying crazy things with such conviction.
I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don’t believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it’s the end of our spe...
This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)
When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.
I’m fairly certain I’m having my first truly religious experience, and it’s probably a very bad thing that it’s happening in a church, but it’s over a sculpture. Mental note: Add idol worship to your list for confession.
I've grown so much since 1996. I think that was the turning point of when I started to go to church every Sunday and not just because you're supposed to. But because you enjoy going and listening to the Word and being excited about it.
I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.
I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
Most churches are run by preachers who went to seminaries, who decided to be preachers when they were 18, 19, 20 years old. These preachers never met a payroll. They don't know how the world works.
Churches were never meant to be mental hospitals. They were supposed to be military outposts under orders to storm the gates of hell. Every believer is on active duty and called to serve a higher purpose with the rank of their blessings and talents.
The only people who had authority within the Church to stop Brendan Smyth from having contact with children were his Abbot in the Monastery in Kilnacrott and his Religious Superiors in the Norbertine Order.
If I don't go to mass, necessarily, every day, but I definitely go to the church every day. That's how I start my day. I like to get in there for about 15 to 20 minutes and say my prayers.
My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
We must become a people who are in submission, that is, submitted completely to the mission of the Church, 'in statu missionis.' Thus, living fully within the mainstream of grace, under the mantle of God's divine authority, and by uniting ourselves t...
